I’ll try to explain better.
Specifically to your single.php, you want your previous/next button to navigate to your next or previous post:
1- of the same category if you navigated to that post through category.php.
2- of all the posts if you navigated to that post through index.php.
In this case, in your category.php, within your Loop when you iterate through all your category posts, append ‘?viewport=category’ to the end of the anchor’s href. Here’s a quick example:
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink();?>?viewpost=category"><h2><?php the_title();?></h2></a>
<?php the_content();?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
Add this to your category.php file. As you can see, i’m appending a parameter to the link for each post within the loop.
You can use the same code in your index.php, just don’t append anything to the posts’ URLs.
No, in your single.php, you’ll detect this variable using the $_GET variable and handle the next and previous links appropriately:
if(isset($_GET['viewport']) && $_GET['viewport'] == 'category'){
//handle your links as if they came from the category listing
}else{
//handle your links as if they came form the homepage or from another listing
}
That’s the logic behind it. To grab the next and previous posts form a specific category, you’ll need to create your own query that filters for the appropriate category. Then, from the array of posts, find the first post that is chronically before the current post and the same for the next post. Extract their links and include these into the next and previous buttons. If no ‘viewport’ variable is detected, then revert to WPs built-in next/previous buttons since you don’t want to limit the scope to one category specifically.
Does this makes sense to you?
